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Monthly Archives: June 2010

I’ve long had this hunch – just a hunch, really – that sooner or later, in a fit of ideological fervor, Hugo Chávez is bound to align Venezuela with North Korea. It just seems like the logical end that his long record of lunatic statements, far-over-the-top posturing, and senseless maximalism has been building up to…

Hugo Chávez has been included in Foreign Policy’s list of the world’s worst dictators. For any reasonable Venezuelan, this is just another embarrassment. For Chávez, it reads like a Facebook page: so many new friends to make! You know it’s coming: "Lukashenko, Ahmadinejad and Raúl are there, but Blaise Compaoré? Where have you been all…

BBC News has a video on the efforts to reduce crime in Petare. Reporter Will Grant toured with the Sucre police, and the piece is boiler-plate, a missed opportunity. Not helping to disguise the piece’s stench of journalistic tourism is its lack of precision. Petare is in the "state of Sucre"? It’s the "largest, most…

It takes a moment to digest the chart Setty puts up in his latest post. Overall, the Electricity Rationing measures the government imposed in the first half of the year did basically nothing to cut down electric consumption. They annoyed everybody, created this vaguely MadMaxish atmosphere of impending doom, but, overall, just didn’t cut consumption. (In…

By now you’ve heard the news: that bank that the half owner of Globovision runs got taken over. The bank is Banco Federal, the guy is Nelson Mezerhane and, for once, this is not what it looks like. In a society where everything is political, the very notion that a bank that is closely tied to the key…

It always goes like this. Every four years. I think I’m too old for it. I tell myself it’s all just a bunch of marketing and hype, anyway. But every four years, it gets me. I’m not proud of it. I want to think I’m an adult. But then I see a clip of Marco…